By Murray Hunter
FOR two generations, Wikipedia has stood as the default authority for factual information.
Students, journalists, professionals and ordinary readers have turned to it for geography, science, medicine, economics, history and politics.
It became the first stop, often the only stop, in the digital age as a reference.
What began as an open, collaborative project to democratise knowledge has, according to its own co-founder Larry Sanger, been quietly reshaped into something far less neutral.
Sanger has often spoken about this issue. Between 2006 and 2007, tools such as WikiScanner revealed edits originating from computers at CIA headquarters in Langley and other intelligence agencies.
These were not isolated incidents. Wikipedia’s open editing model, combined with layers of anonymous administrators, created an environment ripe for systematic influence.
Sanger has described the platform as a “gold mine” for intelligence agencies worldwide.
Wikipedia has become a one-stop shop where narratives can be adjusted and presented as settled fact.
Sanger has been careful to say he does not claim a single set of puppet masters, yet the evidence of agency involvement and the subsequent ideological hardening are hard to dismiss.
This can also be evidenced in Malaysia. Many sections within Wikipedia give a pro-government or opposition version written on the subject.
Wikipedia is a political battlefield here, too.
The integrity issues run deeper than state actors.
Biographical pages have long been vulnerable to sockpuppet accounts, where editors are paid or motivated to present subjects in the most flattering light.
Just look in the Wikipedia Bahasa Malaysia version.
Organised groups of editors, sometimes labelled Wikitrolls, have pushed particular political lines while suppressing others.
A parallel industry of paid consultants and self-styled volunteers has approached individuals and corporations offering to craft or defend favourable entries, the writer included.
Over time, these practices, layered on top of heavy-handed administrative control that has pushed out many conservative and libertarian voices, have eroded the original commitment to a neutral point of view.
This was particularly seen during the COVID-19 era, where a US government agency “propaganda” on the source of COVID, the lethality, and potential treatments was run through Wikipedia, at the cost of the truth.
Sanger argues that the result of this is an encyclopedia that too often functions as an organ of establishment narrative rather than a reliable record.
Russian critics have gone further, framing it as a Western imperial tool.
Whether one accepts that stronger characterisation or not, the practical consequence is the same: a resource once trusted across the world now carries a credibility deficit on so many contested topics.
This matters because Wikipedia has shaped how two generations' understanding of the world.
Its articles feed search engines, classroom assignments, media backgrounders and, increasingly, the training data of large language models.
When the base layer is skewed, the distortions travel further.
The original Wikipedia vision of a free, open store of human knowledge was powerful back in the 2000s.
What has emerged instead is a platform that still contains vast amounts of useful material, yet can no longer be treated as an unexamined authority.
Readers must approach it with the same critical eye once reserved for government press releases or corporate public relations, which many news portals carry today as their own journalism.
In that sense, the age of the unquestioned digital encyclopedia is ending.
Yet the cyber-information landscape is already shifting.
Artificial intelligence is moving into the space Wikipedia once dominated.
Tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Grok and other similar systems can summarise, cross-reference and present information with far less of the institutional guardrails, taboos and activist gatekeeping that now characterise the encyclopedia.
They are not perfect; they inherit biases present in their training data.
But they offer a practical alternative for those who have grown wary of Wikipedia’s editorial culture.
As a result, Malaysians are now noticing long-winding AI-produced political analysis appearing in chat groups as someone’s own opinion. – August 10, 2026
